In 2019, I was asked to write my own obituary. I was taking a professional development course for artists. The course was very goal-oriented (one year, five years, ten). Writing an obituary was another kind of long-term weather forecast. It was a version of the exercise screenwriter Angus Fletcher recommends: write the end so you know what you’re aiming for.
I loved the assignment, but I struggled to complete it, in part because at that time in my life the things I wanted to imagine for myself felt so intangible (to be comfortable, to be married, to be remembered). There was a breathlessness to the obituary I wound up writing. It was a story I hadn’t quite worked out how to tell, and the finished product was an attempt to prove something, if only to myself. It embarrassed me, reading it aloud to my cohort. How dare I want.
These days, my college roommates, Janie and CinCin, exist as squares on a screen. Many years past our final Princeton dorm room with its industrial carpet, we reunite monthly on Zoom. Waiting to log in and greet them, I take stock of everything that’s happened in the past month. New job. Taxes. Tearing down the shed with my neighbor; swinging a sledgehammer.
At some point, years ago, when I was first coming out to people, I lost track of who I’d told. I kept a list in my phone at first, but it was unreliable. There were people who knew without my telling them. There were people I was sure I’d told (there they were, on the list), who seemed surprised when I finally made a wide-release Facebook post.
With my closest friends scattered across the country, across the world, I still have trouble remembering who knows what about my life. “I may have already told you this,” is a regular fallback in most of my conversations, especially with the friends I mostly see on video calls. Did I ever tell Janie and CinCin about the brief span of months at the end of 2017, into 2018, when I long-distance dated my friend and writing partner, Molly? I can’t remember the answer to this question when Molly and I start dating again, more seriously, in 2023.
It’s a life update like any other, but the words lodge in my throat. Janie and CinCin know I’m queer, but for a long time they don’t know that this queerness encompasses both bisexuality and asexuality, and in order to tell them this story, I must first own up to the years of not knowing myself as well as I wanted to. I have to begin to explain how that not-knowing kept me frozen. (Asexuality: how, for me?) In 2023, even though I have only just started to understand it all, I want to tell Janie and CinCin the full story. I need to. Within me, I feel a thaw.
When I was writing my obituary assignment, I returned to a favorite publication for inspiration. The Princeton Alumni Weekly’s Memorials section unfurls in skinny, somber columns toward the end of each issue, sandwiched between Class Notes (babies and weddings) and the Classifieds (apartments in Provence and quasi-eugenicist matchmakers promising to find mature, educated women for you). Throughout the pages of the PAW, all history happens in jump cuts. (“University Won’t Rename Wilson School or Wilson College,” reads one April 2016 headline. “Citing Racism, Trustees Rethink Wilson and Rename Policy School,” appears in September 2020. Neither of these headlines would exist if it weren’t for the 33-hour sit-in led by the Black Justice League student group in 2015.)
The memorials, like all obituaries, fascinate me. What to emphasize, from an entire, sprawling life? In the PAW Memorials section, individuals are distilled down to their greatest accomplishments. This one invented a new form of cancer detection. This one became a Broadway mainstay. This one served in the army for decades. This one loved every grandchild. This one held public office. Chauffeured Albert Einstein. Joined the clergy. Founded a Fortune 500 company. He is survived by his wife.
Janie likes the Memorials that embrace life’s humor. After she reads an entry for a recent grad, she makes CinCin and I promise to write each other’s Memorials, to write hers. Maybe throw in the part about the freshman year phlegm spittoon or the senior year tarot reader. Obviously, we agree immediately. What grief it would be, to see my friends boiled down to accomplishments. I want them weird and beautiful, in full color. I want anyone reading their obituaries to feel that somewhere, around a corner, they are still alive.
When Molly and I dated the first time, I was so anxious I couldn’t eat. I drove the seven hours to visit her chewing on stick after stick of wintergreen Extra. I nearly shat myself, barely making it to the first Kum & Go over the Minnesota state line. The source of all this tumult was a very prosaic thing: I’d never dated before and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I wanted to be with her, but when I was with her, I was gripped with fear.
I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I spent the following years cold, searching for words to explain myself—to explain when and why that prey feeling strikes, to explain that it doesn’t always. When we got back together years later, I lived with the memory of the fear but also with the freeing knowledge that my queerness was a mansion, with rooms upon rooms of feeling. Desire lived in some of those rooms. In some rooms, love, community, history, favorite characters, certain shoes, legacy.
Molly was in those rooms. I knew that we belonged together, but in what way? For the first five months of our renewed relationship, I didn’t know what to call her. I already knew that “writing partner” wasn’t big enough. Over the years, I’d stretched it to capacity, trying to signal that Molly was unique in my life, so important, someone I would never move on from. Our writing lived in the rooms, every word, but she was more to me than our writing.
Flip straight to the Memorials section and scan the last paragraph of each entry. He is survived by his wife. Next entry. He is survived by his wife. Next entry. His wife of fifty years survives him. Next entry. He is survived by his wife.
I remember a man from one of those older classes. I interviewed him for the final paper for a class on the history of sexuality. I spoke with him on Skype for hours about being gay (he preferred “homosexual”) at Princeton, though he clearly wanted to talk about other things: racial bigotry at the Eating Clubs, nights playing in the band, the fact that for a long time he didn’t want to be part of the alumni community, as though any of us have any choice in the matter. The PAW knows where to find us.
As we talked, a toddler wandered into frame. “My grandson,” my interviewee said. “My wife’s out getting lunch.”
“Oh,” I said. It was 2010. I was twenty-one. “You…” I couldn’t find the words.
He smiled at me across all that distance: him in his desk chair, me on my dorm room floor. He is survived by his wife.
What have I been looking for, all these years?
He is survived by his brother, sister, nieces and nephews. He is remembered as a kind and witty friend. He will be missed by the Episcopalian church choir where he devoted so much energy. Turn the page again. More recent classes leave the truth unvarnished. He is survived by his partner of twenty years. He is survived by his husband of six years.
I am heartened by this shift, but I miss the aunts, uncles, choir members. I comb the Memorials section for them. What proof do we need that someone was queer? What proof do I need? In my twenties, I searched everywhere to find the exact word for my yearning. In the Memorials section, I just want to see proof of life.
The way I felt about Molly didn’t have to be succinct, but—beautiful problem—it had to be legible. The first time we were together, very few people knew. Now, I wanted to tell everyone.
I took months to mull it over. Spring became summer became fall. I climbed through thin mountain air and thought of her. I attended a friend’s memorial and thought of her. Walking on the beach in North Carolina before my cousin’s wedding, headphones left behind at the Airbnb, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I took a picture of the water and sent it to her. On a stretch of unoccupied sand, I drew our initials with my finger. I laughed at myself while I did it—what the fuck?—but I did it all the same. I imagined her there with me. I thought about the way she inches me closer to myself. There was a dizzy joy in my stomach. These were girlfriend feelings, I decided. These were love feelings.
I tell Janie and CinCin about years-worth of weekly Skype chats, about the title “writing partner” bursting at the seams with meaning, about the way my heart fizzed like seafoam. They listen quietly. At the end, CinCin stares at me. “And, sorry, why would you not be calling her your girlfriend?”
I assumed that once I finally found myself in a relationship with someone, I would know the steps to a dance that’s been danced since the beginning of time. My lips would find theirs. Desire would swing through my body like Miley Cyrus straddling a wrecking ball. And if I couldn’t name the steps, couldn’t hum the tune, they would. That’s the way it went in everything I read.
I couldn’t predict it would be more like this: years of friendship (naturally occurring), then months of dating (breathless), then friendship (white-knuckled), friendship (hard-won), friendship (unlike any other), then a walk on a beach and a warm, sudden realization. For us, there is no choreography. I call her my girlfriend because she already is.
I think, in the end, it should go something like this: Jackie Hedeman lived a long, full life. She traveled again and again to the places and people she loved best. She learned herself over and over. She wrote constantly and laughed a lot. She loved Dippin’ Dots more than was strictly justified. Once, on her birthday, her dentist hand-delivered a bottle of red wine. Once, in high school, a classmate called her handwriting “masculine and neurotic.” She was a light sleeper. She knew exactly when to arrive at the airport and exactly when to leave a party. She left her corner of the world better than she found it. She is survived by her wife.
Copyright © 2026 by Jackie Hedeman
